One of our staffers came up with a great idea, an idea so fun that we dropped everything we were doing and started reassembling the 27″ iMac.

He thought it would be awesome to take a picture of the iMac internals and make it into wallpaper. So we did exactly that.

We reassembled the iMac to the point of how it would look like as if you just opened it: no glass, no LCD, and no iSight. We took the wallpaper shot, then fully reassembled it and put our fresh wallpaper on the machine. The results were nothing short of wonderful.

We learned a long time ago that “sharing is caring,” and didn’t want to keep this accomplishment all to ourselves.

1. Use either a lens with rectalinear correction or photoshop’s len’s correction filter to get rid of the barrel distortion and angular perspective, being sure to center the camera *precisely* in the middle of the screen and get it parallel with the screen.

2. Use top-down lighting or two flood bulbs at 45 deg. out from either side. This eliminates glare, and better defines all of the details (not to mention makes the picture look better than a drunken party pic). Hence, *no straight-on flash.* It’ll class it up.

These are some pretty simple steps to make this kind of photo look like the product photos we see direct from our fav. manufacturer. If you’re going to take the time to do tear downs, why not take a few extra minutes to make it worth all of that effort?

If it were me, I’d drop down the brights with some of my image editors to leave all the detail in the photo, but make it a non-distracting desktop- sort of like you’re seeing the parts through the smokey haze of the black bezel and turned off display.

It’s really just a friendly suggestion, but one, were I in your position, definitely worth consideration.
Cool idea, btw.

I also support Dan’s comments about lighting making a big difference. I often take photos of my clients’ machines during my own teardowns so I remember exactly where everything was in case of unanticipated problems and also to share with the client when I’m done – they like to see that stuff too sometimes – and I have learned not to use flash, but set my camera on a tripod and use a slower shutter speed to get the pix I want.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions for future wallpapers (and lighting setups!).

We had an interesting time lining up the camera with the iMac — once we removed the LCD, the iMac’s body naturally rotated upward, since the counterweight was gone. We also had to line up the floodlights just right, or we’d get excessive glare on the heatsinks and optical drive.

Thanks for the tip on Photoshop’s lens correction filter. We’ll certainly utilize it for future wallpapers!